In recent years, from the viewpoint of environmental protection, emission reduction of exhaust gas from an engine (internal combustion engine) mounted on a vehicle and improvement in fuel consumption rate (fuel consumption) are desired. As a vehicle that satisfies these requirements, a hybrid vehicle has been developed and put into practical use.
The hybrid vehicle includes an engine and an electric motor (such as a motor-generator and a motor). The electric motor is driven by electric power generated due to the output of the engine or by electric power stored in a battery (an electric storage device). The hybrid vehicle can run using one or both of the engine and the electric motor as a running drive-force source.
Vehicles such as a hybrid vehicle include a vehicle that can select a manual gear shift mode (sequential mode). This type of vehicle is equipped with a gear-shift instruction device (generally referred to as a gear shift indicator (GSI)) (for example, see Patent Literature 1). The gear-shift instruction device provides a gear shift instruction (gear shift guide) for prompting the driver to perform a gear shift operation (an up-shift or a down-shift) in the case where the selected gear shift position is different from the appropriate gear shift position (for example, a recommended gear shift position that allows improving the fuel consumption rate (fuel consumption) obtained from an engine load, a vehicle speed, and similar parameter, during running in the manual gear shift mode.